How I got my Literary Agent – Three Simple Words

When I was little my parents sent me to my room, to punish me for all the very bad things I did. Pretty pointless exercise. My friends lived in my room as they now live in my computer. Alec was in there, riding The Black Stallion, and Hal and Roger where there, diving off coral reefs in the search for adventure, and Reepacheep was there, flourishing his sword and rushing forward into the new Narnia after the Last Battle. I loved being punished; which does very strange things to your psyche!

When I was older, and I was still bad, they punished me by taking my typewriter away. That actually worked, because from reading I had moved to writing and I loved my typewriter, it created worlds for my friends to play in. There is nothing weirder than a twelve year old who cries because she cannot have her typewriter.

Books and writing are part of my whole life, they gave me everything I ever needed apart from a fried egg sandwich and even then they taught me how to make the bread to put the egg on.

When I was twenty one and looking down at the inescapable bump of a baby growing inside me and the horrible truth dawned, that this was something I couldn’t talk my way out of, I picked up a book. I had never picked up a baby before small child was born, but picking up a book told me pretty much all I needed to know. She turned out fine. I trust the books.

Now I am 45 and in one way or another I have been writing for over 30 years. In the last few years I have written a lot and I have been paid for a lot of it which is, ultimately, how we judge if we are good at what we do.

Now comes the scary bit; you raise your head from a book and look up at the high crystal mountains of publishing where books are born, where the big six publishing houses crowd slab shouldered against the elegant spires of prestigious independent imprints and you want to be there, no matter how hard the climb.

You think you can write, people have actually paid you for what you write, but bloody hell, there is a lot of rubbish out there and some people will pay for anything. To prove to yourself that yes, you really can write, you have to put yourself up against the best. Deep in your heart you’re worried you’re the literary equivalent of the no hopers on X Factor, the delusional ones, the ones that couldn’t carry a note in a skip, you need to prove to yourself you’re not the nutter in the spotlight, blinking, about to be laughed at.

In the same way that there are people who love films who like to learn about directors and camera angles and get all geeky about Industrial Light and Magic there are people who love books who love to learn about how they come to exist. I’m one of them. We know about agents and publishers and rights and acquisitions and we learn that for every self published book and celebrity biography that has tripped blithely onto the bookshelves there are thousands upon thousands of other people trying to fight their way out of the darkness into the light of mainstream publishing.

We learn that to climb those crystal mountains of mainstream publishing you will need to get an agent, the literary equivalent of a Sherpa, because they have the maps to the treacherous foothills of publishing. Without one you won’t even find the mountain, let alone climb it.

We learn that the odds of getting a literary agent to represent us are huge. We learn how massive the odds are that agents will even read what we write when we send it to them cold. We learn that getting an agent is a long slow heartbreaking business and chances are we will fail, but we have to try.

The UK publishing industry is small and intimate and alien to me, sitting in my village in Turkey, far from the buzzing centre of London. Traditionally literary agents like paper, they don’t like words delivered electronically, and it is hard to contact and it is nearly impossible to navigate amongst the different agencies, where the myriad personalities and preferences slowly pick their way over the teetering towers of unsolicited manuscripts, gatekeeping the world of publishing.

America is different, again the agents guard the pass, but their submission system is different, the literary world there is more immediate, it is also, naturally, more massive. It will look at emails but it wants stuff summarised, short and snappy and obviously saleable and it is still a million to one shot for a girl in the back of beyond who never can go to conferences and cons where agents meet writers in teeming rooms of dreams.

How then do you get to these people, these decision makers who matter? How do you get your story in front of the right agent on the right day? Particularly, if you know no one and you live nowhere. You can pray that your writing has a voice, but voice isn’t enough, you need to maximise your chances by doing your homework and I am brill at homework, because homework is reading and reading is easy.

You search site after site for agents looking for what you write, you research their preferences and their past successes, you study their criteria, how they want work presented, how much they want to read of your work, how long they take to respond, will they respond at all, and you build a list of maybe, possiblies, who on a good day might be willing to bet their livelihood on your writing.

My list is automatically shorter than most because many agents won’t look at email and email is all you have if your snail mail goes via the village teashop. My list is automatically shorter because my genre is crowded. My list is shorter because many agencies cannot work with people based outside of the UK or USA. But eventually you end up with a list and they are agents that you like, people whose work you respect, people who present themselves to the world in a way that works for you. If you are going to put your soul in this person’s hands then it helps if you like them from the start.

Then you grit you teeth, take your self esteem in your hands and send out stuff. Tailored, real, polished, stuff. Just a few submissions, just for feedback, just to see if you have it right.

Responses will come, and you judge yourself on those responses, you listen to them and consider and change what needs changing and make it better, and then you send it out again.

I very cautiously took my first steps into the literary foothills back in August. I sent a book proposal to one agent. Against all odds he loved it. However his professional reader hated it (even gatekeepers have gatekeepers in the literary world!). I didn’t agree with all the reader said but I agreed with a lot of it. It was constructive criticism, the first I ever had, I changed things accordingly.

By September I felt braver because I knew more. I sent my proposal out again, to a larger number of agents. And I waited.

An agent read the proposal and the sample and asked for more. And then another did, and another, and another, in New York, in London, eleven agents requested more.

So I sent more, and I waited.

I was sitting quietly, working, the radio playing in the background, because I’m better than I used to be and I can listen to music again now. Blue Oyster Cult came on, “Don’t Fear the Reaper”. I recognised it from the very first bar because it’s part of the life I once had. I smile, sadly, the memory and the music mixed up once again. He really loved that song.

The music played on and half bemused I turned back to my computer. I opened my email account and I read three simple words – Offer of Representation – and I started to cry.

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